Crystal Salkeld has a lot to stitch together in the next couple of weeks.
Not only is she preparing for her first big market of the season — Knit City Montreal in two weeks — but she is also handling her shop’s biggest, and most challenging, commission.
The proprietor of boutique yarn store-cum-makerspace Purl and Hank on Portage Avenue was sought out by the costume team behind Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie reboot to make the knitted and crocheted accessories for the three Ingalls sisters, Mary, Laura and Caroline.
The original NBC television show, which ran for nine seasons from 1974 to 1983, was based on the semi-autobiographical Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, an American writer, teacher and journalist.
Wilder penned the beloved classics, set in 1871, about her childhood experiences in her settler and pioneer family, who lived in a little log cabin on the edge of the Big Woods of Wisconsin.
Salkeld was contacted by costume designer Mitchell Travers after he visited her shop to source the fine yarn and natural fibres the department required and cleaned out her stock.
“Our shelves are empty now. Mostly what he chose we already had, but because of quantities he needed, we ordered more in,” Salkeld says.
Travers also commissioned her to make the mittens, garters (to hold up stockings), shawls, fingerless gloves and bonnets for two of the sisters in the show, working from 10 patterns to create a total of 65 pieces, some of which are multiples.
“There has to be one of each thing done for May 19, and the rest done before shooting. Some of the garments they don’t want completed so it can look like the sisters are knitting their own things,” Salkeld explains.
It’s a tight deadline and the volume of work was too much for one person, so Salkeld posted a callout on Instagram for local needlework experts.
She was inundated with replies.
Within 24 hours, more than 45 Winnipeggers from the city’s knitting and crocheting community put themselves forward.
The numbers were whittled down to 15 after she shared the patterns Travers provided.
“I let them know if it’s in their wheelhouse to respond again and if they wanted to opt out they could,” she says.
Those who replied are now part of the team.
There’s an added challenge: the knitters and crocheters are working from a number of esoteric patterns — some are reproductions from the 1800s — with very sparse information.
Before they can faithfully recreate the designs, they first have to decipher them.
“It’s like reading gibberish,” Salkeld says.
“We are going to have to work through as a team and figure out what they actually mean. It’s a puzzle. With the patterns, they gave us a Victorian and modern equivalent chart. So we have pictures of what it looks like and the words that go along with it, and symbols, like a legend or a key, of how we can make it modern to understand it.”
With a little less than five weeks left to get everything done, they have to work swiftly.
The group met last Saturday for their first briefing and to pick up their yarn and pattern kits. The plan is for each knitter to work alone, meeting up in the ship every 10 days to check in and ensure each piece and its multiples are uniform.
“If two people are working on the same pattern, we have to make sure that they are very much the same size. We are going to try and make it more of a community event, so if somebody is having trouble then someone else can help them go through the pattern,” Salkeld says.
As exciting as it is to be asked to take on such a large commission, there is a measure of trepidation, too.
“This is the first time we’ve done something like this. It seems like it’s a very fast-paced world and it’s not necessarily what knitters are crocheters are used to. It’s a lot if responsibility,” Salkeld says.
“I am overwhelmed by it all, but I have full confidence in our community. I know we will work as a team to get the job done.”
av.kitching@freepress.mb.ca
AV Kitching
Reporter
AV Kitching is an arts and life writer at the Free Press. She has been a journalist for more than two decades and has worked across three continents writing about people, travel, food, and fashion. Read more about AV.
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